While I took apart the base unit of this dead Acer Aspire Switch 10 (SW5-012) tablet/laptop convertible, the main display had been left under the punishing direct heat of southern California summer sun. I don't like fighting glue, but heat at least helps reduce their tenacious grip. I pulled out my prying tools from iFixit and plunged into the seam between gray and black plastic surrounds holding its AU Optronics B101EAN01.5 screen in place.

The double-sided adhesive foam tape was thickest around the left and right sides, gripping tightly enough that I broke the frame on both sides trying to peel them off. There were slightly less of it across the top, and surprisingly little across the bottom.

I had hoped the LCD module would pop free once the touchscreen digitizer glass had been freed from its frame, similar to how an Amazon Fire tablet was put together. But no such luck, there appears to be more adhesive involved.

Once I pushed a pick into the gap between the digitizer glass and the LCD polarizer, I realized the bad news: they have been glued together across the entire visible front surface of the screen. It's going to take a lot of effort to separate them and I don't see how it could possibly be worth the effort.

My objective here is the LED backlight, so just as I did for the Chromebook cracked screen and the Amazon Fire screen, I peeled back the black tape holding the LED backlight to the LCD. Starting with the bottom section to expose the integrated driver board.

I am starting to recognize the signs of a LED backlight power connection: a few connectors separate from the high-density connectors used for controlling LCD pixel data. An inductor and a diode for voltage boost conversion, and an IC controlling it all.

The black tape holding this display module together is much more difficult to remove than those encountered on previous screen backlight salvage projects. The glossy substrate is weaker than the adhesive, causing it to easily stretch and break. Now that I've identified the portion I cared about for my project, I pulled out a blade and cut the rest of the tape allowing me to open up this display module.

Once the backlight folded away from the LCD pixel array, I can see I've already cracked at least one LCD glass layer in my effort to pry it from the front digitizer glass. I'm not even going to try to salvage the polarizer filter from this one, so my blade continued its work cutting all pixel data lines to free the backlight for further examination.